Paranoid Universes

When Lawrence Olivier decided to film Shakespeare's Hamlet in
1948, he explicitly chose to stage it as the Oedipal dilemma of a
mourning prince, introducing his cinematic version with the motto, "this
is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind," and leaving
out Fortinbras as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so as to focus
exclusively on the displaced patricidal fantasies of his protagonist.
Yet produced at the onset of the cold war, and thus at least implicitly
reflecting cultural anxieties about surveillance that were to dominate
this period, Olivier's Hamlet also gives a historically specific twist to the domestic tragedy. For particularly striking about Oliviers' mise-en-scène is
that it focuses on an environment in which everyone spies on everyone
else, in which no one trusts the other because everything is under
suspicion. The characters are often visually framed by the arches of the
cold stone castle Olivier has chosen as his setting, so as to suggest
that they are claustrophobically locked into their respective emotional
straits. In addition, characters are repeatedly staged as the vanishing
point of someone else's gaze, sometimes unaware of the fact that they
are being clandestinely observed. Then again, as when Hamlet confronts
Ophelia with his demand that there be no more marriages, claiming his
madness was caused by her wantonness (3.1.), his passion is
self-consciously staged for the eyes of those he knows to be hiding
behind an arras, thus apparently beating the King at his own game of
espionage.[1] Olivier,
furthermore, also makes use of travelling camera shots, repeatedly
circling around the empty throne of the dead king, gliding toward the
queen's empty bed only to pass by quietly, or floating up and down the
stone stairway that leads to the parapet at the top of the castle, where
the ghost first appears. In so doing, Olivier manages to evoke an
overriding sense that in this paranoid world, characters not only
clandestinely watch each other even while presupposing correctly that
they are being watched. Rather the camera, haunting the scene as an
invisible presence, itself serves as an agent of surveillance, whose
source is unclear.

While
Lawrence Olivier may claim to take his cue from Freud's timeless
reading, focussing both on Hamlet's incestuoustual desire for his mother
as well as his coming to grief over the Oedipus complex, because his
own obscure sense of guilt paralyses his actions, the climate of
conspiracy he chooses as his setting also relocates Shakespeare's play
within the cultural concerns of the late 20th century. Along these lines
René Girard has noted with regards to the strange void at the center
of Hamlet that
"the bizarre plots [the characters] hatch, their passion for watching
without being watched, their propensity to voyeurism and spying...make a
good deal of sense as a description of an undifferentiated
no-man's-land between revenge and no revenge in which we ourselves are
still living."[2] The
contemporary quality both Girard and Olivier attribute to Hamlet's
hovering between action and non-action may well have to do with a
continuing fascination for the paranoid rhetoric of repetition at the
heart of a logic of conspiracy. Hamlet's theatrical passion is aimed at
exposing the clandestine truth about his father's death by declaring the
"Mousetrap" on stage to be the "thing/ Wherein I'll catch the
conscience of the King" (2.2.600-01). Yet a choice between revenge or no
revenge can only occur once Gertrude's and Claudius' response to a
representation of the narrative of guilt he attributes to them serves as
evidence that his suspicions are well founded. In other words, his
interpretation of their response will not only confirm the suspicion he
has already been harboring, but also locates proof in the realm of his
inner perceptions, re-introducing doubt because these may be delusions.
Furthermore, Hamlet is invariably locked not only into a logical short
circuit, but also into a cycle of repetitions. What he has the players
perform is not just "something like the murder of my father" (2.2.591).
It is also 'something like' the story he believes to have received from
his dead father's ghost. Lawrence Olivier highlights precisely the
representationality of all evidence meant to support a logic of
conspiracy by staging the dumb show as an exact repetition of the scene
the ghost described to Hamlet in the first act. Both are clearly marked
as the same cinematic versions so as to render visible that a narrative
plot, allegedly exposing a domestic murder plot, is meant to fill a void
in knowledge introduced by a contingent event of death. What Olivier's
cinematic transcription emphasizes is that both are theatricalizations
of a passion, namely a son's suspicion about the death of his father and
the fidelity of his mother, grounded on the evidence of his own inward
intuitions. Whether the narrative plot Hamlet privileges is accurate or
not seems less significant than the fact that the production of a viable
narrative is necessary in order for him to live and indeed for his
enterprises to stop losing the name of action.

Linda Charnes has suggested that Hamlet might fruitfully be seen as "the first noir detective."
Shakespeare's play, she argues, serves as "modernity's inaugural
paranoid text" because "no one in this play 'knows' anyone else; and it
is precisely this missing 'intersubjective' knowledge ... that
constitutes Hamlet as a noir tragedy."[3] To speak of Hamlet as
an inaugural paranoid text means, on the one hand, highlighting that
while Shakespeare's mourning prince seeks to confirm the knowledge he
allegedly already has of Claudius' guilt, what we are presented with is
an enactment of paranoia in the literal Greek sense; namely an abundance
in mental activity that is in excess of its mark. This performance of
'over-knowing,' furthermore, entails a hermeneutic act of radical
re-codification. The surfeit in knowledge entails disclosing latent
meanings of events that are opposite to their appearances, raising the
question of whether the evidence he gains is knowledge he has or
knowledge he wants, because it will serve his emotional needs in his
mourning for his father. On the other hand, to speak of Hamlet in terms
of textual paranoia and noir tragedy,
implies the cross-mapping of two historical moments. For it entails
reading the Shakespearean text within the frame of postwar anxieties, so
as to discover in a Renaissance text the inaugural energia of
conspiracy (in Greenblatt's sense of social energies) that has returned
to haunt post-modernity. As Patricia Parker has argued, Othello and Hamlet reflect
on "the sixteenth-century development of a nascent secret service,"
emerging from the historical junction "where an older language of divine
or angelic intelligence...was being converted into the new lexicon of
espial." These plays thus aesthetically refigure – as an epistemological
hunger to see and to know – the "paranoid atmosphere of spying and
being spied upon," the omnipresence of secret spies, of accusers and
informants, obsessed with seeing and knowing 'privie secretes' prevalent
at the time of Queen Elizabeth.[4] Implicitly then, treating Hamlet as
an inaugural text of paranoia implies locating it within the concerns
of our contemporary culture of conspiracy, to confirm that what concerns
us is a repetition, or continuation, of a prior historical concern.

While
my own argument is heavily in debt to the critical debate which has
claimed that Shakespeare haunts contemporary culture, the historical
cross-mapping I am proposing moves away from the question of
phantomology, in order to ask what is at stake in reading from the
position of posteriority; of looking backwards in history to uncover an
inaugural historical narrative of conspiracy that will confirm our own
suspicions about a contemporary surfeit of narratives culturally
exchanged to assure the production of a meaningful world.[5] If, in what follows, I propose reading the theater of passion displayed in Hamlet –
the prince's revenge plot, Ophelia's hysteria – under the auspices of a
code of conspiracy, I do so in order to explore the mutual implication
between a modern subjectivity and modern skeptical doubt as this, too,
finds its inauguration in Renaissance culture, yet as it also gains new
urgency once it is reconsidered belatedly, from a position of
posteriority. As Charles Taylor notes in relation to Descartes'
skepticism, to argue that "this new conception of inwardness, an
inwardness of self-sufficiency, of autonomous powers of ordering by
reason, also prepared the ground for modern unbelief" is inevitably an
anachronistic judgement.[6] Yet
such looking back at history from the present allows us to both
disclose an inaugural text for the paranoid subject, with its excessive
hunger for seeing and knowing, as well as to look at the present from a
position of the past, in order to uncover an inaugural text for the
paranoid tone of contemporary hermeneutic practices like psychoanalysis
and deconstruction. For, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, the analyses they
produce also feed on a proclivity to put any stable knowledge pertaining
to the subject under suspicion, to privilege a hidden, latent meaning
over manifest surfaces, to cultivate epistemological uncertainty and
doubt. By anachronistically confronting Shakespeare's world of
conspiracy with such contemporary analytic concerns, I follow Mieke
Bal's suggestion that we might best practice contemporary historical
inquiry by virtue of what she calls preposterous history:
an analytic reversal on the part of the critic, "which puts what came
chronologically first ("pre-") as an aftereffect behind ("post") its
later recycling."[7] According to Bal, this kind of revision, based on the notion of shared time as
an epistemological requirement, makes the claim that an obsession like
Hamlet's with finding visual proof for a clandestine conspiracy, and the
surfeit of narrative this produces, is defined by concerns that are
both of today and then. In the particular case of Hamlet one
might well locate the shared concern in the way mourning can take on
the guise of paranoia. For even while, as Philippa Berry argues,
Shakespearean tragedies delineate death "as a region whose opening
perplexingly eludes the ocularcentric...desire to 'discover'...a
formerly uncharted territory", it is precisely the gap in knowledge this
evasion provokes which the mourner fills with the help of
hallucinations – be they actual spectral emanations or fantasied scenes
of betrayal.[8] Apodictically
put, the concern defining both Hamlet's hermeneutics and contemporary
conspiracy theories (including psychoanalysis) is an attempt to
translate a contingent event like death into a meaningful story one can
live by. In the following I will, however, take the "preposterous
historical" cross-mapping I am proposing one step further, by
introducing gender into the equation between mourning and paranoia.
Because pitting Ophelia's response to her father's death against
Hamlet's will allow me to disclose an alternative rhetoric of mourning;
one that strikes through all categories of skeptical doubt in favor of
immediate, unmediated action.

Doubting Woman

As
Katherine Eisaman Maus persuasively argues, with Hamlet insisting on
the impeachable validity of his internal experience of grief over
external rituals of mourning, a two-fold disturbance comes into play.
Privileging a true interior over a falsifiable exterior introduces
alienation in the sense that a person's passions come to be "imagined as
properties of the hidden interior, not immediately accessible to other
people." Positing such notions of a mysterious inward truth which can
never fully be displayed, however, not only entails doubt as to whether
the perceptions of others correlate with one's own, but also "a
troubling corollary suggestion about the limitations of the perceiving
subject."[9] As
a result, Hamlet's desire for a reliable means of achieving certainty
comes to be pitted against epistemological qualms. Furthermore,
Shakespeare's tragedy performs an epistemological desire, aimed at
assuaging the gap between an internal truth and suspicious external
manifestations, precisely as an externalization of the allegedly
inaccessible inwardness; namely as a theatrical enactment of a
self-investigation on the part of the mourner along with an
investigation of the passions ascribed to those who share his world.
Hamlet's initial doubt, which finds its ultimate confirmation in the
appearance of the ghost – "I doubt some foul play. Would the night were
come...Foul deeds will rise...to men's eyes (1.3.256-8), – in turn
produces the conviction that, because his skepticism endows him with the
ability to look through the falsified exterior of his peers, he can see
everything. His inability to understand both his mother's motivations
for her remarriage and Ophelia's desire for him (because the inwardness
of the other is by definition always inaccessible) transforms into an
attempt to reconstruct this inwardness under the auspices of his own
conspiracy narrative. Paranoid certainty casts them as the players in a
script of hidden truths qua guilt
he has devised and will now stage – taking the form of his histrionic
displays of melancholic madness, of the "Mousetrap" and finally of the
fatal duel with Laertes. As Maus laconically notes, evidence "is in the
eye of the beholder." For "what the perceiver sees is determined by his
own perceptual idiosyncrasies, not by what is 'out there'."[10]

This logic of suspicion, however, not only casts fundamental doubt on the evidentiary procedures in a tragedy such as Hamlet.
Rather, it also brings into play a further disturbance. As Maus
concludes "the problem is not just that people create their own monsters
but also that monsters are really out there, though hard to find."[11] Much
as Othello creates his Iago, Hamlet may be creating a murderous uncle, a
faithless mother, a wonton lover, because "he waxes desperate with
imagination" (1.5.87). However, desperate as he may be, Hamlet is also
perspicacious in suspecting that something is amiss. Indeed, to look at
Hamlet's enactment of skeptical doubt 'preposterously' in Mieke Bal's
sense, which is to say in juxtaposition to contemporary discussions of
conspiracy, allows one to foreground the fact that this surfeit of
narratives involves two contradictory aspects. To believe in a
conspiracy may well be an adequate response to the existence of an
actual political intrigue (Iago's plot to destroy his superior officer,
Claudius' plot to rid himself of a bothersome son-in-law). At the same
time, conspiracy narratives may also be the result of a particular
mind's proclivity to put all phenomena under suspicion, because it is
guided by the general assumption that all external manifestations must
be fallacious; a cover for secret motives. Significant, then, about
skepticism's celebration of doubt is that it contains, on the one hand, a
healthy interrogation of the world, in an effort at addressing
knowledge that is seemingly inaccessible. On the other hand, skeptical
doubt may result in a belief in an all-embracing narrative that will
eliminate all doubt; that will assuage the subject's epistemological
fallibility by introducing the category of unequivocal belief.

It
is, of course, this shift to a belief beyond (and untainted by) doubt
which marks the fatality of the passion of skepticism that Shakespearean
tragedies like Othello or Hamlet enact.
For while it emerges that Hamlet's existence depends on his capacity to
produce a meaningful narrative of his world, once this narrative
becomes totalizing, it brings to the fore the very vulnerability of the
autonomous self it is meant to assuage. Not only because, manifestly, he
is living the text of another, namely the command of his dead father to
"Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder" (1.5.25). But because,
much along the lines of Steven Greenblatt's argument for Iago, as Hamlet
constructs a narrative of murder and hidden guilt, into which he
inscribes those around him, he deals in probable impossibilities (that
all women are unfaithful and treacherous) rather than improbable
possibilities (that the death he mourns is contingent and not the result
of a conspiracy, that the women have no secret motives, that Claudius
feels no guilt when, for example, Hamlet finds him clandestinely
praying).[12]From
this one might deduce that if the vibrant and viable gesture of doubt
subtending conspiracy thinking allows the skeptical subject to astutely
suspect and then disclose actual clandestine power struggles, this
attitude becomes paranoid (i.e. madly in excess), when the excess of the
epistemological narrative produced aims at cementing suspicion once and
for all, and as such aims at putting all further doubt under erasure.
Like the Derridian pharmakon,
skeptical doubt emerges as a two-faced drug, with the issue of healing
or infecting a question of dosage. If, on the one hand, doubt can be the
motor for insisting on the instability of knowledge, the existence of
an inwardness that contradicts appearance, it can, on the other hand,
result in an abundant passion of doubt where certainty is gained by a
belief in suspicion as the one and only epistemological key, under which
everything not only can but also must be subsumed.

Such
fundamental reassurance of the subject's ability to know the inwardness
of others is gained at the price of a loss not only of the world
(insanity), and a loss of one's loved ones (the production of corpses)
but also a loss of one's self (death), and it is precisely this radical
loss which, according to Stanley Cavell, is at stake in the scene of
skepticism, as this is epitomized in Shakespearean tragedy: Completeness
of belief (in Desdemona's untainted love, in Gertrude's maternal
loyalty) and perfection of doubt (in all women's fidelity) emerge as two
sides of the same coin. Cavell reads the precipitous move from one to
the other as an extraordinary representation of the "astonishment in
skeptical doubt."[13] In
doing so he draws on Descartes' suggestion in his first Meditation
that, because there are no inconclusive indications by which waking life
can be distinguished from sleep, what results is an astonishment
allowing the subject to blur the boundary between experienced and
dreamed realities. Yet significant for Cavell in any tragic subject's
preference for dissolving his actual world into a trance, is that this
choice is less the result of a conviction in a piece of knowledge than
in an effort to stave off some knowledge too uncomfortable to bear.
Applied to Hamlet (although Cavell's concern is Othello)
one might argue: To dissolve a particular woman and the inaccessible
inwardness her alterity poses to the tragic hero into a dream, in which
she is either unequivocally faithful or else her equally unequivocal
faithlessness is proof that the time is out of joint, casts the feminine
character as the stake in a scene of skepticism that has nothing to do
with the difference she actually embodies. It serves to stave off any
intersubjective challenge she poses, which might well be tantamount to
accepting that skeptical doubt can never be resolved, because alterity
always defies secure knowledge as well as any complete absorption of
another by the self. Within the dream of conspiracy Hamlet harbors,
however, women can either assume the position of the beloved other,
whose proof of integrity is the evidence for his own existence. Or, if
he can convince himself that they are not be trusted, then his very
existence, and with it the world he inhabits, is radically put into
question, but in such a manner that he does have one certainty, namely
the impeachable validity of his suspicion of woman's innate proclivity
toward sin. Any wish for certainty can only be achieved – thus the logic
of Shakespeare's theatricalization of the scene of skeptical doubt – by
dissolving a world inflicted by difference into a dreamscape, sanitized
of all doubt, even if it is infected by the certainty that foul guilt
exists. In this dreamscape one's existence is once again guaranteed by
virtue of the fact that one can trust the beloved other, even if a
paranoid re-encoding has occurred, as fidelity is recast into
infidelity. One can trust the fact that one can't trust woman. All
irreducible contingencies that keep the astonishment at the heart of
skeptical doubt alive are transposed into a conspiracy of gender. Yet it
is the consequences of this choice of not knowing, which, according to
Cavell, plays like Othello or Hamlet ultimately
force us to confront: "Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to
escape the consequences, or price, of this cover: that the failure to
acknowledge a best case of the other is a denial of that other,
presaging the death of the other," and one might add, a denial of the
human.[14]

In
Hamlet, the scene of skepticism and the astonishment of doubt inherent
to it, finds a particularly poignant epitomization, not simply because
Hamlet's rejection of Ophelia ("Go to, I'll no more on't, it hath made
me mad...To a nunnery, go" (3.1.148-51) presages the flower-decked
corpse that will be drawn to a "muddy death" (4.7.IV.183). Rather the
abundance of corpses with which Hamlet ends can be seen as symptomatic of what Cavell calls "a conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack."[15] For
these deaths give finitude to precisely the intellectual lack that the
initial death of the father evoked in his son, repeating it, but in the
sense of overturning it. After all, the event of death in general
elicits radical skepticism par excellence on
the part of any grieving survivors precisely because it produces a
situation where epistemological categories no longer hold. An
unwillingness to believe that a particular loss has actually occurred,
and concomitant with it one's doubt as to whether the deceased is truly
among the dead or still inhabiting the world of the living, thus emerges
as the perfect setting for paranoia. For paranoia entails finding, or
rather inventing, a narrative that promises respite from knowing what
one cannot just not know about the inevitability of death. To be more
precise, it allows one to stave off any knowledge of the contingency of
mortality – its certainty but also its meaninglessness – by exchanging
this for an over-abundance of hallucinated messages that make a given
death abundantly meaningful, ascribing an agent (the foul uncle), a
motive (treachery) and also a response (revenge) to this death. As
Alexander Welsh notes, for a son who is unwilling to forgo mourning "the
death of one's own father is a crime," and results in the son's willing
there to be a ghost, for "his story of murder answers to the emotional
needs of the hero just as surely as the play within the play." If Hamlet
accepts unhesitatingly the specter's mandate of revenge, he does so
because it empowers him in the face of the traumatic impotence a
contingent event of death inflicts. Because it is easier to believe in a
conspiracy than to accept the contingency of death. While "there is
nothing one can do about the death of a loved person," Welsh continues,
the suspicion of murder offers one the opportunity for doing something,
and thus endows one with agency: "Death suffices for mourning, but crime
calls for punishment as well."[16]

Giving
a different turn to the critical debate inaugurated by W.W. Greg in
1917, with its challenging argument against Claudius' guilt, I want to
claim that at issue in Hamlet is
not so much the question of how the father died (which never finds a
conclusive explanation), than the fact that his death calls forth a
passionate enactment of the son's suspicion that this death was a crime.
The ghost's epistemological status may be nothing but "the shadowy
embodiment of deep psychic disturbance," enacting the murky interface
between "dream and reality, credulity and skepticism" as Greenblatt
claims.[17] Yet
what is certain is that this ghost, precisely because it incites a tale
of conspiracy, not only activates doubt in the mourning son, but in so
doing also offers Hamlet the psychic support that will shield him from
acting upon his suicidal meditations. Rather than following his father
into the realm of death, he returns the dead father to the living as he
keeps re-enacting his conspiracy narrative revolving around a scene of
foul murder – in the "Mousetrap," in his argument with his mother in her
bedchamber, in the final scene, when he directly names Claudius'
treachery, "Here, thou incestuous, murd'rous, damned Dane,/ Drink off
this potion (5.2.330-1.). Significant, then, about this paranoid
re-encoding of the death of the father as crime is not only that it
gives voice to Hamlet's feeling that this loss is an unjust violation in
a metaphyiscal sense, but rather that it allows him to transform a
contingent event into a purposeful act, for which not God but a fellow
man is responsible. Taking up Cavell's suggestion that in Shakespeare's
world "to exist is to enact, as if the basis of human existence is
theater", one might wager that Hamlet's paranoid performance of
murderous revenge, in the course of which he coerces those he suspects
of complicity with this crime into assuming the roles he has designed
for them, emerges as the one assurance he has of his own existence.[18] Because
he can stage his engagement with death for the benefit of others,
because he can enact his meditations on death, on culpability, and –
primarily to Horatio – on the ability to act, he returns to the world
from the liminal position between the living and the dead he had
initially assumed after his father's death.

If
we return once more to the argument that notions of conspiracy can
apply both to a political reality and to a paranoid attitude, Hamlet's
investigations into an alleged crime open up a further dimension of
meaning. The state of Denmark is actually "disjoint and out of frame"
(1.2.20), since the death of Hamlet's father, not just because Claudius
actually uses Polonius to spy for him, but equally because young
Fortinbras has decided to march against them. Hamlet's investigation
into the illegality of Claudius' reign, his conjecture that he is a
murderer, can then be seen as a displacement not just of his Oedipal
desire (to kill the father), nor his own death-wish (to kill himself in
imitation of the dead father). Rather it staves off knowledge in
relation to a different scene of death, namely that of war. This
displacement seems all the more significant, given that the ghost –
recalling as it does a scene of domestic treachery – appears under the
auspices of this other threat of destruction. As the guards, standing on
the platform of the fortified castle explain, Fortinbras' decision to
recover the land his father lost in battle, is "the source of this our
watch " (1.1.109). From this one might surmise that the dead father's
specter straddles two prior scenes of crime, the one political (the
violence of territorial war), the other domestic (the violence of the
mother's remarriage). If, however, we take the ghost to be the shadowy
embodiment of psychic fears, then one might further surmise that the
anxiety Hamlet privileges, namely his unwillingness to accept that the
death of his father may have been contingent, is juxtaposed with an
actual fear, namely the anticipation of Fortinbras' attack. While the
former is grounded on the economy of skeptical doubt, the latter is
grounded on certainty, much as Fortinbras functions as the diametrical
opposite to Hamlet in his response to the death of his father. For he
turns mourning into a narrative not of conspiracy but of conquest, whose
course of action lacks all doubt. Might not Hamlet's suspicions about
Claudius' and Gertrude's guilt be a cover for the war he knows for
certain will come, with the enactment of his conspiracy fantasy inside
the castle a counter-weight to the scene of war outside the castle? In
the monologue about his "dull revenge" (4.4.33) he does read his own
predicament – "I...that have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd" (4.4.56)
– in relation to Fortinbras' "Exposing what is mortal and unsure/ To
all that fortune, death, and danger dare" (4.4.51-2), only to use his
memory of the sight of twenty thousand dead to assure himself of the
validity of his own murderous thoughts. Yet it also seems significant
that to the end, Hamlet privileges the domestic scene of violence, and
with it the enactment of the scene of skeptical doubt, over the
certainty of political violence. In dying he asks Horatio "Report me and
my cause aright" (5.2.344), making sure that his friend will faithfully
transmit a tale "of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts" (5.2.386) to
Fortinbras. For we remain in the realm of representations and
anticipation. Horatio's testimony will, implicitly, be a repetition of
the play itself, commemorating the paranoid world that has collapsed
with the death of its protagonist. Hamlet's corpse, along with all the
others, is proof not of the truth of the conspiracy he passionately
enacted, but of the fatality of its effects; which is to say proof of
the fact that while one may privilege a cover narrative to deny
knowledge, one can't escape the consequences of this cover. At the same
time it leaves the uncertainty over the status of his father's death
fully intact.

There
is, however, a second passionate scene of mourning, which, by bringing
gender into the equation, also introduces a different engagement with
death. As Alexander Welsh notes, "the two conversions of loss to suicide
are Ophelia's act and Hamlet's mediations," only to add that the
suicidal revenger's obsession with feminine sexual infidelity produces
"a fiction that discovers adultery in the context of mourning and
revenge."[19] The
scene in Gertrude's bedchamber serves as the acme of the displacement
of the mourning son's suspicion. Doubts about the lawfulness of his
father's death and a desire to find proof for the veracity of the
ghost's claim, are now negotiated as suspicions he harbors in relation
to his mother's guilt, and by extension in relation to any woman's
fidelity. The fact that, as Valerie Traub argues, "the threat posed by
Gertrude's sexuality is paranoically projected onto Ophelia," because
she merges in his mind with his mother, only confirms the value women as
such have in his passionate self-enactment.[20] They
are cast by Hamlet as the Other of doubt, because their difference,
which is to say their separateness from him, is what his paranoid
enactment seeks to cover over as he reduces both Gertrude and Ophelia to
the question of their fidelity (of which he is either certain, or
certain in his doubt). Yet they are also the Other of doubt in the sense
that they may be appropriated by Hamlet's paranoid narrative but not
contained in it. Of course, in Shakespearean tragedy, women repeatedly
pay the price for the hero's denial of knowledge – be it in relation to
mortality, to the fallibility of his symbolic position, or the veracity
of his self-fashioning. Precisely because Ophelia enacts the
consequences of Hamlet's paranoid projections, by putting an end to the
logic of displacements feeding his revenge plot, she can also be seen as
functioning as a corrective to his dream of conspiracy.

After
her father is killed by Hamlet in place of the uncle he suspects of
murder, she turns first the self-alienation and then the death he denies
onto herself. While Hamlet, uncertain about the cause of his father's
death, externalizes his mourning so as to find evidence that murder has
occurred, she, certain that murder has been committed, uses her own body
as the stage on which to perform a far more radical break between
fallacious external appearances and her inner anguish, rendering the
latter visible by virtue of an excessive lament that no longer fits the
socially acceptable rituals of mourning. Her enactment of grief is
deemed by her brother to be "a document in madness" (4.5.176) precisely
because she juxtaposes a description of her father's burial with a
charming discussion of the power of herbs. In so doing she defies the
paranoid logic embraced by the rest of the court, according to which
external appearances are meaningful because they point to but cover over
a hidden meaning, by emitting utterances where surface (charming nature
descriptions) and depth (the passion of affliction) are placed
contingently next to each other. Her hysteric enactment of grief also
circles around doubt, yet in a way that moves beyond any mental
oscillation between certainty and uncertainty. As a gentleman explains
to Gertrude, lamenting the death of her father, she:

speaks things in doubt/That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing,Yet the unshaped use of it doth moveThe hearers to collection. They aim at it,And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them/Indeed would make one think there might be thought,though nothing sure, yet much unhappily (4.5.7-13).

While
her hearers agree that her utterances are meaningful, they cannot know
what she means. Ophelia's performs what one might call semiotic
contingency, because though her affect is perfectly transmitted, the
words she uses could mean anything or nothing. The case can't be
decided. Her language of hysteria can, thus, be read as one instance
where her enactment of grief marks the limit of Hamlet's conspiracy
fantasy, because while his paranoia feeds off an abundance of narrative
energy (too much meaning), her hysteria performs a zero-point of
narrative; the moment where symbolic meaning collapses, where to decide
whether something means too much or too little has become irrelevant.

At
the same time she also refuses the role of being the privileged stake
in Hamlet's conspiracy fantasy in another sense. Not only does the lewd
language of her mental alienation perform what he suspects her of,
namely sexual openness. Her lack of restraint is a public self display
that, because it includes everyone, no longer really includes anyone,
and can, therefore, not serve as a support for his personal paranoid
fantasy. Rather she uses first her hysteric performance of grief and
then her suicide to enact the death he only meditates on. As René Girard
argues, "Hamlet must receive from someone else, a mimetic model, the
impulse that he does not find in himself."[21] Ophelia's
suicide can, then, be read as the act of passion that discloses the
vacuity of his perennial indecision. When he finally declares to
Horatio, "the readiness is all" (5.2.218), he can do so precisely
because Ophelia's corpse, dramatically embraced by him at the graveyard,
has inspired him to finally take action. I would, therefore, claim
that, far from being reduced to being an instrument in her father's and
her lover's conspiracy plots, Ophelia emerges as a figure of radical
action precisely because of the ethical nature of her embrace of death.
While Hamlet's paranoid skepticism induces him to cultivate
epistemological qualms, Ophelia's hysterical scepticism strikes through
all epistemological categories. While Hamlet, in the course of seeking
evidence, comes to cement his belief in a global explanatory key, which
subsumes everything, regardless whether it actually applies or not,
Ophelia transposes all radical doubt about the coherence of the world
(evoked by the murder of her father), into an immediate response.
Because she not only uses her body, but indeed her life, as mode of
expression, her enactment of mourning moves beyond all explanatory
narratives to perform their nullity. Or put another way, Hamlet tries to
transform the crisis, called forth by the contingency of death, into
factual proof, while Ophelia directly confronts the crisis mortality
poses by re-enacting it on her body, cementing not a narrative of doubt,
but the irreversibility of death.

As
Hamlet has recourse to a narrative of conspiracy meant to cover this
traumatic knowledge, he discovers that he can not escape the
consequences of conspiracy, with the dead bodies of its victims serving
as evidence of the very irrevocability of death which, in order to deny,
he had recourse to a paranoid narrative in the first place. Ophelia, by
contrast, doesn't even want to escape the consequences of the choice
not to know that Hamlet's theatricalities have brought into motion.
Indeed, she seeks to externalize that which his passionate histrionics
were meant to cover; namely that death can never be subsumed into a
narrative, whose aim is to cover over the discrepancy between fallacious
exteriority and an inaccessible inwardness, because it falls out of the
frame of representation. Set against the multitude of corpses Hamlet
produces so as to prove the veracity of his conspiracy narrative,
Ophelia's self-produced corpse functions as evidence that not only can
no one escape the consequences of a paranoid plot aimed at covering up
the knowledge of death's contingency, but that the cover itself is all
too fragile. Like the death of Hamlet's father, Ophelia's suicide takes
place off stage, so that a description of her corpse is brought to us
belatedly. Gertrude's narrative, however, is clearly not a
hallucination, returning the dead to the living, but a commemoration
accentuating demise, not least of all because the scene she describes is
one of quiet but irrevocable disappearance; "But long it could not be/
till that her garments, heavy with their drink,/ Pull'd the poor wretch
from her melodious lay/ To muddy death" (IV.vii 179.182). I find it
compelling that Ophelia's is the one corpse we don't just not see, but
that, as in her mad speeches, it conjoins passionate affliction with
lyrical beauty. In questions of death, Ophelia seems to instruct us, we
don't need to choose between the ideal and the monstrous, because death
is both before it is nothing.

Notes

[1] All quotes are from William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Harold Jenkins. the Arden Edition (London/New York: Routledge 1982).

[4] Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins. Language ,Culture, Context (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1996), pp. 233 and 257. It is worth noting
that a climate of conspiracy in early modern English culture has been
foregrounded in recent, especially new historicist criticism.

[6] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), p. 158.

[7] Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago:
Chicago University Press 1999), p.7. For a discussion of psychoanalytic
criticism and its debt to skepticism, producing an analysis that puts
what is the object of an analysis under suspicion, see Georges
Didi-Huberman, Vor einem Bild (München: Hanser 1990).